Elon Musk's legacy is disease, starvation and death

There is an Elon Musk post on X, his social media platform, that should define his legacy. "We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper," he wrote on Feb 3. He could have "gone to some great parties. Did that instead".

- Michelle Goldberg

Mr Musk's absurd scheme to save the government a trillion dollars by slashing "waste, fraud and abuse" has been a failure. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) claims it has saved US$175 billion (5.7 trillion baht), but experts believe the real number is significantly lower. Meanwhile, according to the Partnership for Public Service, which studies the federal workforce, DOGE's attacks on government personnel — its firings, re-hirings, use of paid administrative leave and all the associated lack of productivity could cost the government upward of $135 billion this fiscal year, even before the price of defending DOGE’s actions in court. Mr Musk’s rampage through the bureaucracy may not have created any savings at all, and if it did, they were negligible.

Now, Mr Musk’s Washington adventure is coming to an end, with the disillusioned billionaire announcing that he’s leaving government behind. “It sure is an uphill battle trying to improve things in DC, to say the least,” he told The Washington Post.

There is one place, however, where Mr Musk, with the help of his minions, achieved his goals. He did indeed shred the United States Agency for International Development. Though a rump operation is now operating inside the State Department, the administration says that it has terminated more than 80% of USAID grants. Brooke Nichols, an associate professor of global health at Boston University, has estimated that these cuts have already resulted in about 300,000 deaths, most of them of children, and will most likely lead to significantly more by the end of the year.

That is what Mr Musk's foray into politics accomplished.